4 Questions To Ask About Web Technology

Though some would like to believe otherwise, there is simply no way to run a successful nonprofit or business in today's world without being at least familiar with online technology. There are many questions managers will have but, according to experts speaking at this year's Bridge Conference, they should start with their organization's website.

Speaking at the New York City-based conference, representatives of Big Duck and the Environmental Defense Fund said that website technology is an important component of maintaining a good site and keeping it effective.

Getting the most of this technology, the representatives said, means answering specific questions regarding your current web hosting. They said that if the organization cannot give a definitive yes answer to the questions, then it is time to re-evaluate the content management and constituent management systems (CMS and CRM) and to consider alternatives.

The questions you should ask are:

• Does the organization have a way to track actions such as donations, open rates and event sign-ups?
• Is there enough support for the system that there is confidence it will be around for the long term?
• Does the site’s publishing system make it easy for staff to update content?
• Does the site have the tools and functions to meet organization goals and those of the organization’s audience?

Google To Add Nonprofits To Knowledge Bar

Last year, Google rolled out its "Knowledge Bar," a section on the right-hand side of your search results that contains information about the person, place, or company for which you searched. Nonprofits were not included in the Knowledge Bar at the time, but that all changed this week.

The search engine giant announced Tuesday that nonprofits would begin to be included in the Knowledge Bar. While the feature is still in its roll-out phase, many of the larger organizations already have their information online. For example, a search for the Livestrong Foundation will provide the following information:

• A short blurb of the nonprofit's history via Wikipedia.
• The founder of the organization.
• The founding date.
• Tax deductibility code.
• The latest post from their Google+ page (if applicable).
• Similar organizations.

The most significant thing about the Knowledge Bar is that it has the potential to increase the number of followers for a nonprofit's Google+ page. Facebook remains a giant in the social networking field, but this change could bring more nonprofits to Google+ since they will know that people searching for them will see their posts.

What do you think about this announcement? Do you think it will make a difference for organizations in the long haul, or will it just be a cosmetic change?

Webinar: Nonprofit Accounting Software Experts Live

Update: Missed yesterday's webinar? You can view it in its entirety online.

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It can be very difficult at time to keep up with the latest advances in nonprofit accounting software. It seems like new trends emerge everyday, making for major headaches when deciding which program to use. That's why anyone who is having trouble with these issues should attend The NonProfit Times' latest webinar with Intacct.

"Nonprofit Accounting Software Experts Live," presented by nonprofit accounting software experts Taylor Macdonald of Intacct, and Susan Campbell, vice president of Soft Trac, will lay out the right direction for those who are having trouble choosing a new accounting system. Using there many years of experience in the field, Macdonald and Campbell will show you how to simplify the process of selecting new software.

This free webinar will also teach you how to:

• Determine what you need from a new accounting system;
• Make sure the system you select maximizes financial transparency and accountability to the board;
• Find the right vendor by following five best practices;
• Take advantage of new options made possible by cloud computing; and,
• Calculate the return on investment (ROI) you can expect from a new cloud financial management and accounting system.

The webinar will begin on March 21 at 2:00 p.m. EST. Register for free today to help your nonprofit take the next step in the world of accounting.

6 Ways To Build Your Social Media Audience

Social media has hung around long enough to no longer qualify as the "flavor of the month;" it now qualifies at the "flavor of the last few years and the foreseeable future." Yes, every business and nonprofit want to utilize a social media strategy these days, but there is a catch.

Sites like Facebook or LinkedIn can only be effective for your organization if you have an active audience. The good news is, attracting a few followers can often increase your potential audience exponentially as your friends spread the word to their own networks of friends, etc.

So how do you attract people to “like” your Facebook page, or follow your Twitter feed? Try these tips:

• If you post it, they will come. If you’re launching a new blog or Twitter account, start by posting a few interesting things to show the audience what you hope to gain and that your resources might interest them.
• How do you know what will interest the type of people you’d like to follow you? Ask them. Find a good representative sample of your desired audience and start a discussion with them about what kinds of posts they’d like to read.
• Even with brilliant content, it’s difficult to attract supporters to a site that no one else is following. Ask your staff and other core supporters to follow your tweets, or “like” your Facebook page. Getting them to post comments or reply to your posts can help show an active community.
• Add your social media profile information anywhere your contact information is given. A Facebook or Twitter logo on your website can link people directly to your pages.
• People who already know you are more likely to join your social media communities than strangers, and you can reach people who already support your organization through email, print newsletters and other social media channels.
• Social media is meant to be social. Participating honestly in the online conversation about topics of interest to your organization will build an audience more successfully than any other tip or trick. Post relevant comments that add to the conversation, tweet and retweet the resources other people offer, and watch your follower count grow.

7 Ideas For Website Content

One of the age old battles of the Internet is whether a website with bad design but great content is better than one with amazing design but weak content. This battle is still raging on with no clear end in sight, but one thing is clear: You do need some content on your page to remain relevant.

The textbook definition of a great website is one that the user wants to come back to every day. For that to happen, the site has to have constantly updated content, and not just anything will do the trick. As Robbin Zeff explained in “The Nonprofit Guide to the Internet,” your content needs to be interesting, relevant and, most importantly, new.

There are many different forms of content, and it’s up to you and your webmaster to determine what needs to be on your site. Zeff suggested starting off with the following 7 ideas:

• Identity: Who you are – your mission statement, a listing or profiles of staff;
• Programs and Services: What you do – your programs, projects, meetings, seminars, conferences, etc.;
• Contact Information: How you can be reached – address, e-mail, telephone numbers, office, hours, etc. If you have chapters or member organizations, list how they can be reached;
• Available Resources: What material you have for free or for sale – newsletters, magazines, publications, t-shirts, posters, etc.;
• Current activities: What information you want to highlight – press releases, news reports, etc.;
• Links to related sites; and,
• Help requests: What your needs are – donations of time, information, or money.

3 Online Fundraising Tips

Traditional means of raising money still have their place in the nonprofit sector, but there's no question that online fundraising is gaining steam.

In an article on The Huffington Post, Darian Rodriguez Heyman, who has edited books such as "Nonprofit Management 101," wrote that 15 percent of the $317 billion donated to nonprofits come via the Internet. Organizations must start implementing online fundraising into their overall campaigns, yet many managers fear that it will take up too much of their time. Is there any way to take advantage of this growing trend without the use of a lot of time and money?

Thankfully, the answer is yes.

During the recent Social Media for Nonprofits conferences, presenters shared tips on how to best utilize online fundraising. Heyman listed three that are most useful for nonprofits:

• Make Your Donate Button Shine: Your donate button should stand apart from the rest of your site. When Network For Good simply changed its button's color from grey to red, they saw a 30 percent increase in donations.
• Default Levels are Key: It's usually important to give potential online donors default donation levels (i.e. $25, $50, $100, $250, and other/fill in the blank) to guide their generosity. But just like with the other tips, embrace data vs. gut- take the time to play around with these levels and see what maximizes dollars in the door.
• Map Donations to Impact: As Kay Sprinkel Grace says, "people don't give to you, they give through you." So help make their gift concrete: for instance, a $100 donation may feed 50 children in a particular war torn region, a mere $50 purchases life-saving medication for 60 pregnant women in Africa, etc. Every default donation level must have a specific impact associated with it, but toy around with how you operationalize your impact to gauge what moves people to dig a bit deeper.

You can read Heyman's full article on The Huffington Post.

5 Suggestions For A Modest Website Redesign

When you hear the words "website redesign," images of major overhauls and hours upon hours of work come to mind. This is often the case for sites that have serious problems but, thankfully, that doesn't necessarily describe your nonprofit's webpage.

This was exactly the point that Jono Young and Rahell Guba of Blackbaud made during their session, "Better Nonprofit Websites: 52 Tweaks in 52 Weeks," during the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in San Francisco. As the title of the session suggests, Young and Guba offered 52 tweaks that nonprofits can make to their websites without having to commit major resources.

Here are five of those suggestions that you can use immediately that will make a world of difference when it comes to your website design:

• Use fifth grade language: Clean, simple, understandable external language. Making it relatable is better than making it likable.
• I don’t just want your money: Provide alternate ways to support in addition to donations, such as social media, email, word of mouth, blog about us, templated messages.
• Pictures speak louder: Visualize your achievements, goals, mission, appeals and campaigns. Use an infographic approach and make content digestible.
• Content approval workflows: Have a second, or third or fourth, set of eyes review your content before it goes public.
• Social your confirmation pages: These are your top supporters – help them brag about what they just did and market your organization for you.

5 Ways To Improve Your AdWords

There's a lot that goes into improving traffic to your nonprofit's website. One of the techniques that is most effective is the use of Google Grants AdWords, a program that allows you to purchase cost-per-click (CPC) advertising that will appear based on popular keywords.

According to Kristie Ferketich, Google Grants senior strategist, there are ways to optimize your AdWords to get the most out of them. Speaking at Nonprofit Technology Network's (NTEN) recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, she explained that organizations should keep the following things in mind when working with AdWords:

• Think like a user. See what ads catch your attention the next time you do a Google search.
• Use variations and common misspellings. Google will usually correct someone – but the AdWord will show for the search anyway.
• Include negative keywords. This eliminates your ads from popping up for certain searches, cutting down on unwanted impressions.
• Look at the stats. Analyze the cost and impressions for each AdWord you use. Are you hitting your goals? Is it costing too much to run some words?
• Optimize keyword-matching options. Certain punctuation around search terms will bring up different options. For example, your search results for [animal adoption] would bring up results only for that exact term. A search with “animal adoption” would bring up for that phrase, even if other terms were included in the search. Learn how the search punctuation can help, or hinder, your goals.
• Test, test, test. And for good measure -- test again. Search terms for your AdWords may work one month and sag the next.

5 Reasons Your Nonprofit Needs To Go Mobile

Remember when the only thing a cell phone could do was make calls? That seems like a foreign idea these days, with smartphones dominating the mobile landscape. These devices can not only make phone calls, they can also send text messages, take pictures, and surf the Internet.

That last point is of particular importance for nonprofits, as users now have on-the-go access to their websites. Yet unless your site is designed for mobile, it won't be too appealing to the eye. If you haven't yet optimized your website for mobile use don't worry, it's not as hard as it sounds.

As Heather Mansfield explained in her book "Social Media for Social Good," updated technology has made it easier than ever to stream mobile websites. She listed five reasons that your nonprofit needs to get to work on creating a mobile site:

• To improve group text messaging campaigns: Linking web pages on which readers can “Learn More” or “Take Action” need to be designed so that they can be read quickly and efficiently on smartphones.
• Making smartphone apps more functional: Make sure that the navigation of the website is easily readable on a smartphone being that it’s a small screen. Polish everything to make it easy for the viewer.
• Empower QR code campaigns: If nonprofits are asking supporters to use smartphones to scan a QR code that links to a webpage, a QR code needs to be implemented to link to a mobile site.
• Improve location-based community campaigns: Giving the viewers a mobile site where they can see lists of places, checks-ins, and venues, offers them an opportunity to follow the campaign through the community.
• To optimize search engine browsing: Customize the key search terms for maximum optimization for search engines. The mobile browsers are hungry for new content, so jump on the bandwagon.

19 Ideas To Prevent Cyber Attacks

Remember the good old days when the biggest security concern for businesses was someone stealing from the petty cash box? With most organizations relying heavily on the Internet, another concern has popped up: Cyber Attacks.

Online crime can have disastrous results for individuals and nonprofits. All it takes is one security flaw in your system, and valuable (and often confidential) data could go missing. There are no ways to completely immunize yourself from cyber attacks, but there are ways to make sure you are as safe as possible.

During a recent Risk Management and Finance Summit for Nonprofits sponsored by the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, George E. Constantine III of Venable LLP in Washington, D.C., discussed the danger of cyber attacks, and he offered a look at protective measures:

• Dual Controls: Have at least two persons in charge of certain accounts, cash collection and cash payment systems.
• Internal Internet Use Policy: Make it good, follow it closely and include telecommuting.
• Have a privacy policy.
• Use Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards for data security.
• Software: Keep all software, especially security and financial, up to date.
• Hardware: What is allowed to connect to your system?
• Conduct employee training regularly.
• Know what to protect.
• Control access privileges, change passwords, use best available authentication.
• Free protections.
• Identify responsible manager in case of breach.
• Assess risks and vulnerabilities; establish a response plan.
• Train employees to identify and report.
• If problems occur, think of insurance, statutory obligations and public and client/member relations.
• Note that almost all states have data breach notification laws.
• Comply with laws of states of affected individuals, not just where the organization is located. Statutes will dictate content, method and deadlines.
• Generally, the burden is on the "owner or licensor" of data.
• Do background checks.
• Support whistleblowers.

4 Ways For Your Nonprofit To Go Viral

Every nonprofit wants their online content to go viral. It’s practically the Holy Grail of the online world. Of course, something so coveted doesn’t come easy. If you want your content to be the next Internet phenomenon, you are doing to have to do some work.

Whether it's a YouTube video of a recent special event or a blog post about the organization's mission, nonprofits are always looking for ways to enhance the exposure of their content. In "Nonprofit Management 101," Zoetica CEO Beth Kanter wrote that nonprofits need to encourage others to share their work if they want it to go viral. She suggested the following techniques to make this a reality:

• Give permission to share. Tell your audience that you want them to take your content and repurpose, remix, or recreate it. This can be done by using a Creative Commons “Share, Share Alike” license.
• Be explicit. Sometimes people are inspired on their own, but it also helps to reward them for sharing or creating your content. Kanter suggested creating a contest that gives a prize to the user who makes the best use of your content. You’d be amazed at what people will do free stuff.
• Stock the pond. No one likes to be first, so you may need to get staff and other insiders to jumpstart your effort.
• Lift up examples. Encourage and publically recognize people who create content for you. This can be done by highlighting their contribution in a blog post, on your website, or at an event.

5 Ways To Keep Your Online Devices Safe

Most devices in offices these days are connected to the Internet. Whether it's the standard computer or a smartphone, our technology is online nearly 24/7. While this is mostly a good thing, it also has risks. If you aren't careful, you could be on the receiving end of a virus that could severely hamper the hard work of your organization.

Thankfully, there are ways to safeguard your devices from such risks.

In "Nonprofit Management 101," Holly Ross, executive director of Portland, Ore.-based Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), wrote that it's extremely important for organizations to take the safety of their devices seriously. She recommended using the following five techniques to ensure that your operations continue to run smoothly:

• Firewall: This is basically a gate between the outside world and your network of computers. It’s essential that you have a firewall set up to keep spammers, hackers, and other malicious people from infiltrating your network to use it for nefarious purposes.
• Antivirus protection: Antivirus software should be installed on each of the computers on your network. Worms and viruses continue to be written every day, so it’s essential that you purchase the regular update packages for whichever program you choose to use.
• Backup: Most people view backing up as insurance for extreme situations such as natural disasters, but the backup is most important in many day-to-day situations.
• Passwords: The simplest thing you can do to protect your organization’s data and files is to put in place a strong password policy. Ensure that staff are both using different passwords for logins and changing their passwords frequently.
• Physical security: Equipment like laptops, printers, and desktop computers should be secured to desks with cable locks so they can’t be removed.

Library Digitization Project Gets $1M Grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced Thursday that it has given a $1 million federal grant to a nonprofit effort to digitize the country's libraries.

According to an article in The Boston Globe, the grant money will help form a new nonprofit and create the technical platform needed to create what would be called the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a program that would share content across the U.S.'s public libraries and archives. An independent board will be created within two months to form the new organization, which will work with libraries across the country. The goal is to have a working prototype ready by April 2013. The effort will be headed by the Harvard University library in Cambridge, Mass.

Once completed, the digital library will be free to use for all users. There is also the possibility that it will partner with private entities, such as Google Books, that would allow individuals to access content that has already been digitized.

Efforts to digitize content has sometimes been met with legal resistance. Google has sometimes been stopped in its efforts to put books online because of copyright laws. The endowment's chairman, Jim Leach, acknowledged that the new organization would have to work within those laws, which could potentially limit the content for the DPLA.

The DPLA project will integrate with the European Union's Europena digital library collection. It is meant as a complement to the Library of Congress's ongoing World Digital Library project.

You can read the full story in The Boston Globe.

6 Ways To Improve Your Volunteer Recruitment

Nonprofits are always looking for new ways to improve their volunteer recruitment. The best way to do this, according to Susan J. Ellis, is to put yourself in the shoes of the volunteer.

Ellis, president of Philadelphia, Pa.-based Energize, Inc., suggested visiting online registry sites to look for volunteer opportunities, putting you in the position of a volunteer looking for unpaid work. Doing this can reveal some very important information, such as:

• What's your local competition? (Like it or not, other organizations are doing this too.);
• Conversely, what organizations do you know that want volunteers but are not listed online? Is this to your advantage or not?;
• What are organizations like yours asking volunteers to do? Might such tasks be valuable to your operation, too?;
• How flexible are the other assignments in terms of schedule, place(s) where the work has to be done, etc.?;
• How attractive does each position sound? How much detail does each listing provide?; and,
• Study the descriptions you're posting or preparing to post. How do they compare? Will you be able to compete successfully?

All of this information will help you to better form your own volunteer recruitment program so that it accurately matches what applicants want.

7 Secrets To Boosting Your Online Fundraising

There is no question that online fundraising has become a very popular method for nonprofits that are trying to increase their revenue and donors. Even though it's still not as dominant as traditional means, it has seen steady growth over the years -- the most recent Blackbaud Index of Charitable giving saw it increase for the 12th month in a row.

If your nonprofit is not seeing as much success from online giving, Frank Barry -- Internet strategy  manager for Blackbaud in Charleston, S.C. -- has some tips for you. He recommended seven ideas that will improve your organization's online fundraising efforts:

• Look at Web Traffic: Start by scrutinizing your web traffic. Find out how many people and how often they are visiting your organization’s website each month and if they are visiting your key online fundraising pages. Once you learn more about your web traffic you can make intelligent decisions about how to optimize your website to achieve the best online fundraising results.
• Pay Attention to Referrals: Learn where your visitors are coming from. Are they being driven to your page by social media, search engines, or partner websites? Some 40 percent of your online traffic should be from search engines, so enter your organization’s name into a search engine and observe where your site falls on the list of results. If it is not first, improve your website promotion and educate yourself about making the site easier for potential donors to find.
• Make the Ask: Make sure you have incorporated a specific online ask. The ask should be accompanied by a precise message tailored to the demographic you are targeting.
• Make the RIGHT Ask: Analyze what you request of your donors. Is your ask always the average of your total online fundraising revenue or does it vary with each donor adjusting based on the donor’s giving history? Being smarter about your ask, if executed properly, can help you receive more.
• Know Your Audience: Audience analysis should be a key part of your online strategy, and it should be your goal to put the needs of potential donors first. While you might think your website is easy to navigate, others who do not know a lot about your organization might not find it as easy. Have friends or peers who are not familiar with your site look at it and use their feedback to improve.
• Keep Messaging and Branding Unified: Images or messages should complement each other and organizations should personalize any literature to display ownership and stay on message. It is important to make all your online communication uniform, which will streamline the donor’s experience and will make a return or referral more likely.
• Follow Up Relentlessly: After receiving a donation, make sure to follow up with the donor by updating them with your organization’s progress and show them how their gift has made a difference.

How To Use Flickr For Your Nonprofit

When a nonprofit wants to share photos from a recent event, they tend to turn to Facebook and other social media resources. There's another site out there, however, that can be just as useful for photo sharing.

The site that we are talking about is called Flickr. It has gained popularity in recent years for creating an easy-to-use platform to store all of your photos. It also provides tools that allow you to share these photos with all your followers with just the click of the mouse. Sounds good, but how can you make it work for your nonprofit?

In “Nonprofit Management 101,” Beth Kanter, CEO of Zoetica, listed three examples of how you can use Flickr to tell your story:

• An international organization sends volunteer doctors to developing countries to perform medical services. The impact of their work is documented with photos, which are uploaded to the nonprofit’s private Flickr group. This allows volunteers to exchange photos and related stories and provides an image bank for use on the organization’s website and blog.
• An environmental organization that supports organic farmers had thousands of amazing photographs documenting organic farming techniques. The organization uploaded the photos to Flickr, then enlisted volunteers and members to help organize and share the photos.
• Volunteers and photographers at an animal shelter had taken beautiful photos of the dogs and cats at the facility. The organization uploaded the photos to Flickr and created thank-you cards featuring the pets for their donors.

Build Your Social Media Audience

Social media plays an important role in today's world, especially in business. It's almost unfathomable to find a business that doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account. It's easy enough to set up your online presence, but it's a little bit harder to get people to listen.

Thankfully, "a little bit harder" doesn't mean "impossible." The nature of social networks means that every follower you get can potentially lead to many more. This is because each person "liking" your page will conceivably tell his/her friends to also follow you. Sounds great, but this is all moot if you can't get many people to care about your page in the first place.

A lot of people using social networking sites tend to over-think it. They try to get too fancy and end up with few followers. In truth, the key to building an audience is to post things that are relevant and useful. What's interesting to your followers? Why not ask them? Before making the first post on your new blog, engage your supporters on what kind of stories they want to read. When you get a good enough sample of answers, start writing about those topics.

Even with brilliant content, it’s difficult to attract supporters to a site that no one else is following. Reach out to your staff and other core supporters of your organization and ask them to follow your tweets, or “like” your Facebook page --and to invite their personal friends.

Having an active community is another good way to get people to show interest. Let's face it -- nobody wants to be a part of a page that has no interaction. Try asking questions to your supporters in addition to sharing links. The whole point of social media is interaction with the audience, and there's no better way to do this than starting a discussion.

The most important thing to remember is to be honest when participating in any of these discussions. There will be things you just can't say, of course, but don't be robotic. People like to know that the individual they are talking to is an actual human being.

How Would SOPA Affect Nonprofits?

Visitors to Wikipedia or Google today will find things a little different.  Both sites are participating in a web-wide "black out" to protest pending anti-piracy legislation in Congress.

The two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), have drawn heavy criticism from its detractors, who say that the laws are an assault on the "free and open Internet."  The legislation would essentially allow the Justice Department to shut down websites accused of copyright infringement without a traditional court hearing.

You're probably wondering: How would either of these laws affect nonprofits?  According to The Huffington Post, SOPA and PIPA could have a huge affect on fundraising.  SOPA would give the government the ability to block suspicious sites' Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which convert .com names into IP addresses.  This could have a direct impact on a nonprofit's donation process, as interfering with the DNS servers makes websites more vulnerable to identity theft and cyberattacks.

Some organizations are already speaking out against the legislation.  In the same piece, The Huffington Post mentioned that Global Voices, an international volunteer community of citizen journalists, is joining the protests by "going dark" for 12 hours.  The organization is concerned that the laws would "inflict broad damage" to the work of digital activists around the globe, and would hinder free speech.

Learn more about SOPA and PIPA by reading the full article from The Huffington Post.

Handling Employee Online Privacy

One of the big responsibilities of human resources is to make sure employees are treated fairly and their privacy is protected.  Employees expect what happens in the office to remain there, but today's technology allows people to easily spread the word out to countless people. 

It's up to HR to make sure this doesn't happen so the organization can avoid any legal problems.  But how to do this when the technology makes it so easy?  Jeffrey S. Tenenbaum and Lisa M. Hix of D.C.-based Venable LLP offered some tips on how nonprofits can better handle these sticky situations:

• Employees are going to use their computers for personal use whether you like it or not.  It's an unavoidable fact of life, so make sure staff is educated on what they can and can't post.
• You need a clear and reasonable policy that explains expectations on usage. It should reduce any expectation of privacy on the organization’s computers or email, phone/voicemail or Blackberry systems and the data on them.
• Make sure the policy you create addresses permissible use while guarding against potential legal pitfalls.
• Always be prepared.  Organize a team (consisting of legal, executive, marketing, and HR staff) before a crisis happens, not after.
• Want to check out a potential employee's online interactions?  Get written consent from them first.
• Screen all your candidates the same way.  Don't treat one different than the other.
• Remember that you can only decide not to hire someone based on online interactions if it's a non-discriminatory reason.  For example, you can't just not hire a person because you found out they have different political beliefs than you.